Apple - Pro/Video - Kerry Conran

The Push

What Conran didn't know was how long it would take to move his project from possible to viable. And four years later, when he looked up from his desk (upgraded by then with a Mac Quadra 840 AV), he had generated only six minutes of his feature film.

“I was using Electric Image for 3D, and Photoshop and After Effects, and this was very, very time consuming for stuff I was trying to do,” he says. “It would take five minutes to process a single frame, for a simple comp, not even 3D. Five minutes just to see any changes take place.”

But, with the pluck of a pulp protagonist, he carried on: “I was actually able to see proof all along that it was working. Still, there came a point when I realized I needed help.”

The Pitch

And as it does so often in the serials he loved, help arrived for Conran in the nick of time, when brother Kevin showed the six-minute demo to a family friend, producer Marsha Oglesby. From that demo, Kerry Conran’s personal obsession scaled very quickly into something like a public works project. Oglesby immediately showed the film to her colleague, producer Jon Avnet, who was as much impressed by the demo’s strong composition and design as by Conran’s technological brio.

“The visual sophistication was such that I was just incredibly impressed,” says Avnet. “And when I talked with Kerry about what he wanted to do it just sort of touched the cartoon lover in me. You know, Max Fleischer’s Superman cartoons, Batman, the serials, all the stuff I grew up with. I’d had a desire maybe to do something in this vein, but I really didn’t know how to do it, so it was sort of serendipitous.”

“It would take five minutes to process a single frame, for a simple comp, not even 3D. I was actually able to see proof all along that it was working. Still, there came a point when I realized I needed help.”

On the evidence he saw in the six-minute video, Avnet adopted the project, advanced start-up money, advised Conran as he wrote the script and convinced Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie to play the leads.

“Kerry was an untried commodity, and it’s a big film, so it was somewhat difficult raising money by explaining to people that, well, Jon Avnet thinks he’s going to be really talented,” says Avnet. “I’ve made some successful movies, but my resume is not replete with ‘Spiderman’ and ’X-men.’ So, I’m not an expert. But I did really believe in Kerry and in his talent.”

Custom Workflow

To fully back that talent, Avnet set up a custom digital effects studio, complete with a blue-screen stage, in an abandoned building in Van Nuys. Here, a group of nearly 100 digital artists, modelers, animators and compositors would implement an amped-up version of the process Conran had pioneered in his apartment, creating the multi-layered 2D and 3D backgrounds for the yet-to-be shot live action.

Because Conran’s original idea, marrying live action with digital background, was still the MO for the production version of his movie, although on a much larger scale, it informed every aspect of the schedule and workflow.

In part to enable easy media interchange, they decided to shoot the production in HD digital video instead of film. Visual effects supervisor Darin Hollings notes that Macs played a similar role in the larger production as they did in Conran’s apartment. “Shooting HD was great, super-convenient, because we used a Kona card, so we could easily bring in any HD footage by using the Mac to pull the stuff off the HD deck.”

And to ensure easier shooting and efficient assembly of the live action footage and the digital scenery, the entire movie was previsualized, shot-by-shot, before primary shooting began in London. This involved creating computer-generated storyboards of every shot, including some with digital stand-ins for the actors, and mapping them top down as grids on the blue-screen sound stages. For actors playing on an empty set, viewing the virtual sets on a monitor and then navigating the grids on the floor offered the only way to get their bearings.

Next page: Real Actors Take the Stage

Pro/Video

Kerry Conran

How They Did It

Workflow: The Story Behind the Story

Storyboards

The entire movie was sketched out in hand-drawn storyboards, each approved by the director.

Animatics

Animators then re-created the hand-drawn flat story boards as a 3D animatic, a computer-generated story board with volume, depth, shape and texture. All 2D background photographs were digitally painted to make them look as they would have in 1939.

Previsualization

Using the animatics as a guide, grids were created to map camera and actor movements, with digital characters standing in as placeholders for the real actors, who would be shot later.

After the grids were made into actual maps on the blue screen stage floor to help actors navigate around invisible scenery, the crew pre-shot the entire movie using live-actor doubles in Los Angeles prior to doing the primary shoot in London. This allowed them to solve problems and test shots and set-ups.

Primary Shoot

The real actors were shot against three different blue screen sets on a huge London sound stage. By running footage from the HD camera through a switcher and then through a Mac running Final Cut Pro, they created a simple video keyer, letting them line up the animatics with the live onstage photography and actually do run-throughs.

“Frankly,” says Conran, ”had we not been able to do that, I don’t know how we would have made this movie. It’s really what allowed us to line up everything, given there was nothing there. We got our bearings only by pointing the camera at the actors and then seeing on a monitor where they were standing on this virtual set.”

Post

After each day of shooting in London, they were able to edit in rough comps of the acquired footage and send them overnight to editors in LA, who digitized them into standard definition files and sent back sophisticated offline edits and comps.

The final film, cut entirely on Final Cut Pro, held very close to the original storyboard spec.

Finish

High-resolution digital files were sweetened in a digital intermediate suite at eFilm, where a negative was created from which each print will be struck.